


(No) Comfort in Eternity

by dust_motes



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: First Kiss, M/M, Missing Scene, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:01:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21838648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dust_motes/pseuds/dust_motes
Summary: Shit might be Trevor Belmont's very favorite word.
Relationships: Alucard | Adrian Tepes | Arikado Genya/Trevor Belmont
Comments: 12
Kudos: 142
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	(No) Comfort in Eternity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [asktheravens](https://archiveofourown.org/users/asktheravens/gifts).



> I heard you wanted Alucard and Trevor find more connection during the events of the second season, dear recip, and I hope my fic scratches that itch! Happy Yuletide!

"Eat shit and die", Belmont told him at the beginning of all things. In the days to come, Alucard will think of it often, mostly because the more time in the company of each other they will spend, the more he will realize _shit_ might be Belmont's very favorite word.

It doesn't surprise him, except maybe in the fact Belmont is sophisticated enough to have a favorite word. It still is more information about the guy Alucard has ever wanted to possess.

* * *

"Shit," Belmont says when, three days out of Gresit, they stumble upon a caravan, overturned carts lying in the snow, bodies—or what's left of them—strewn across the narrow, winding road. There's something obscene about the view, here, out in the open, where the quiet grows as thick as the underbrush and has a deathly quality to it that begs for a modicum of decorum. Belmont's _shit_ reverberates through the air intercut with leafless branches like too-long claws and sinks deep into the snow turned it into dirty mud by blood and chunks of meat. Alucard sighs and thinks, _It figures._

Sypha stops their horses with a click of her tongue. Had she or Belmont asked, Alucard would have informed them he can't smell anything alive except them and an occasional bird in the radius of a mile or so. But they hadn't, so Alucard says nothing. He jumps out of the cart with the two of them and joins the search. His forearms get numb from digging in the wet, cold slush. His fingers don't find anything except a stone and three sticks and an ivory button that would've paid for a village, once upon a time. Alucard leaves it in the snow.

Over the snowdrift they both dig into, his eyes find Belmont's angry, empty ones. It feels surprisingly like looking into a mirror.

* * *

"Shit," Belmont says when, tired and hungry, they stumble into the next nameless village. They don't expect much—water for the horses from the village well is usually the most they can pull off; people don't trust strangers these days—but yet again the reality manages to take them by surprise.

The world upside-down, it used to be called. The season of excesses. Carnival—the one instance where someone with a hunched back or a limp or just so poor they haven't found a warm place to sleep in weeks could lead a street dance.

Here and now, it's just the death approaching, Alucard suspects. People have different ways of coping.

Belmont was the first grabbed and drawn into the fray. His feet are unsteady like they never are in a fight—Alucard can concede that dancing and fighting require a different skill set from most people even though the routines look very similar sometimes—but he's laughing with the pretty girl that caught his hand earlier. 

It's a very new, very unexpected sound.

By Alucard side, Sypha sighs wistfully. "Do you like dancing?" he asks her, guessing the answer even before the question jumps off his tongue.

"I've… never really had a chance to try," she says. "Not like this."

Alucard could offer to teach her. He suspects it won't be necessary. Someone will yank her by her hand soon enough. It might be good for her, Alucard thinks. A human connection that's not an embittered monster-hunter or a man destined to kill his father. Someone who approaches the looming death as it should be approached—with denial, not a gleeful anticipation.

Later still, when alcohol more thoroughly dulls the self-preservation instincts of someone with nothing to lose, they might invite Alucard for a dance as well. There's something ridiculous in that image, something so out of place laughter bubbles up in his throat and threatens to spill in an ugly, inhuman sound that should terrify but would go unnoticed in this crowd weaving through the streets in their final dance. 

He will say yes, Alucard suspects. In the meantime, he listens for Belmont's laughter, not harsh like after they encounter the Horde stragglers, not like something died in his mouth and scratched his teeth, just loud and free and belonging to a younger man.

* * *

"Shit," Belmont says when he presses his palms to Alucard's chest. They're trembling, Alucard notices distantly. And this is the first _shit_ that's not about what Alucard says or does, but about _Alucard_. 

He almost feels flattered.

The silver bolt sticking out of his chest gleams dully in the light of the setting sun. His head is on Belmont's knees. He doesn't remember how it got there. Belmont was… somewhere to the front of the fray when it happened, Sypha to Alucard's right, the ground solid under his feet and under his back when he fell and hit it with a thud. 

He wants to laugh. He would, if not for the blood filling up his lungs, rising in a small flood in his throat, sticking to his teeth and lips.

Alucard has never liked thinking of himself as a creature of blood, whatever one might mean by that. His own tastes like iron and shit on his tongue and—he does laugh at the thought, a small, horrible, wheezing sound that makes Belmont press harder against Alucard's chest, as if it could help at all. "Sypha," he calls, his voice ringing strange in Alucard's ears. "Sypha!"

Sypha is keeping them alive—or Belmont, at least—by dispatching of the last of his Father's soldiers. Or not his Father's—it takes a certain kind of abundance of imagination to give a crossbow to a monster and say "Aim at the vampire" that, Alucard suspects, Dracula hasn't been capable of since—Since. It doesn't matter much, in the end.

He wants to tell Belmont to stop worrying so much. It doesn't suit him at all.

He wants to tell Belmont to stop saying _shit_ so much even though he'd just start saying it more.

He wants to tell Belmont that if he has to go, this is a better way than Alucard would have wagered when Belmont told him "Eat shit and die'" and Alucard thought, _Never, if only to spite you_.

His hand finds Belmont's bony wrist and squeezes. For the two heartbeats before Alucard lets go, it's like digging one's fingers into well-loved familiarity of a stone coffin.

* * *

"Well, shit," Alucard says, when Belmont finally stumbles down the hole that used to be the entrance to the Belmont Hold. Alucard himself mostly jumps in and out of it when he needs to get to the library—which is more often than he thought he'd be here, to be perfectly honest. He really should've got on that staircase project he's been contemplating ever since he started cataloguing the books, but—But it seems like a weird transgression from where he's standing and even on his best days Alucard feels like, for the last couple of months, his whole life has been one long weird transgression.

And now Belmont is here, shaking dust off his clothes and hair and putting a hand to the back of his neck. He's still so painfully young, Alucard can't help but think.

They both are, in a way.

"Shit," Belmont replies and grins. It stretches his mouth wide and inviting. It stretches the time between them and shrinks the space until Alucard can take a step towards him—and one more, and another—and gets his destination within reach like it's easy. "So, the world's ending," Belmont says, putting his hand on Alucard's shirt above the bolt scar that doesn't want to disappear completely, "again."

"I've seen some worrying signs," Alucard agrees, humming under his breath. But he doesn't worry—not today, not right now, not when their mouths meet and the world, supposedly ending again, tilts slightly to accommodate for them, now, together.


End file.
